This page is served by one small ARM board in a closet, alongside every other app on this domain. Here's what that box costs to run — live.
Everything on the meter right now — the box below, plus every machine reporting in. Per-machine breakdown in the whole fleet.
The host — one Orange Pi in a closet
connecting to pulse…
An Orange Pi 5 class single-board computer: roughly 4–6 W idle, 12–15 W with all eight cores pinned. There is now a plug meter on it — a Tapo P110M reporting true wall draw, PSU losses included — so the figures above are read, not modelled. These idle/full-tilt inputs are the fallback used only when the meter or its poller is down, and they still drive the what-if sums further down the page.
Worst case assumes every core pinned 24/7 for a year — it never is. Rates prefill from the latest EIA U.S. residential average.
| App | Up | Mem MB | CPU % | Est. / month |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| waiting for pulse… | ||||
Idle power is split evenly across running apps; busy apps pay for their own CPU on top. Every app on this domain — including the calculator you came from — is on this meter.
The fleet — every machine on the meter
| Machine | Status | Load | Mem GB | Draw | Est. / month |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| waiting for pulse… | |||||
Other machines report themselves to pulse every 30 s with roost's node-report.sh — the CI Mac mini is only on the meter while it's awake. Quiet for 2+ minutes counts as asleep, ≈0 W. measured draw comes from a real instrument — macmon reading the die on Apple silicon, or a Tapo smart plug reading the wall on the Orange Pi. Those aren't quite the same quantity: the plug includes PSU loss and anything else on that outlet, so it's the more complete number of the two. est is modeled from CPU load between the idle and full-tilt watts, and is what's left when no instrument is reporting.
Every disk on the meter — used against installed capacity, reported by each machine alongside its power numbers. Sleeping machines keep their last-reported figures (data doesn't sleep). “Rented” prices the same installed space as big-cloud SSD block storage at ≈8¢ per GB-month, billed on what you provision, not what you fill.
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Used GB stacked by machine — the top edge is everything the fleet holds. Machines only record while awake, so a sleeping Mac's band drops out until it reports again; capacity itself doesn't change, so flat is good and a creep is a trend.
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Stacked by machine — the top edge is the whole fleet. pulse records a sample every 30 s (kept 90 days); machines without a power sensor use the same idle/full-tilt model as above. Sleeping machines drop to the baseline.